Hilda Mary Burston was born on 21 January 1884, the eldest of three daughters in a family of five children born to Thomas and May Burston. Her sister Dorothy May (1891-1990) was employed as a graphic illustrator for a department store Finney Isles. Another sister, Winifred Charlotte (1889-1976), was a pianist and later taught at the Conservatorium of Music in Sydney.
Burston studied with R. Godfrey Rivers and a Miss Anderson at the Brisbane Technical College, and for two years with Elioth Gruner in Sydney in the early 1900s. The only trace of this activity however is that she exhibited a marine oil painting in the in the Queensland National Agricultural and Industrial Association exhibition in 1914 (no. 22) and served on the Queensland Art Society committee in the years 1914-15.
She was a good friend of Queensland watercolourist Vida Lahey and supported her petition to have the Melbourne tonalist painter Max Meldrum appointed as Art Instructor at the (subsequent) Central Technical College. Burston, a tall thin woman, was one of the first group of twenty-one women admitted to the Queensland Public Service, where she worked in the Registrar General’s Department. She rowed with the Queensland Ladies’ Team and enjoyed ballet and theatre. The Lahey and Burston families had nearby properties on Mount Tambourine but it was only after she took further lessons from Lahey that she began to exhibit extensively with the Royal Queensland Art Society in the years 1931 to 1958. Her typical subjects included flower studies and landscapes of the Brisbane area (Anne Street, Kedron Brook and Gold Creek) and further afield such as Cooloongatta, Tweed Heads and views from the property at Mount Tamborine.
- Writers:
- Cooke, Glenn R
- Date written:
- 2009
- Last updated:
- 2011
